One little show was unusual in its character. A fool named Jules Guérin, wanted by the police for not paying his rates, or something of the kind, fortified his house in the rue Chabrol, and defied the whole armed might of Paris to fetch him out. It was a kind of Sidney Street affair, for he was armed with an automatic pistol and fired at any policeman who approached. M. Lépine, the prefect, decided to besiege him and starve him out, and when my wife and I wedged our way through vast crowds, we found the rue Chabrol surrounded by a veritable army of gendarmes. No one was allowed down the street, to the great annoyance of my wife, who desired to see Jules Guérin.
While we were talking together, a woman plucked my wife’s sleeve and said in French, “You want to see Guérin?... Come with me.”
She led us down a number of narrow passages beyond the police cordon until, suddenly, we came into the very center of the deserted street.
“Voilà!” said the woman. “Vous voyez l’imbécile!”
She pointed to an upper window, and there, sure enough, was the “imbecile,” Guérin, a sinister-looking fellow with a black beard, with a large revolver very much in evidence. My wife laughed at him, and he looked very much annoyed.... It was a full week before he surrendered to the law.
One of the most interesting times I had in Paris was when the Confédération Générale de Travail, under the leadership of Jean Jaurès, declared a general strike against the government of Aristide Briand. It was a trial of strength between those two men, who had once been comrades in the extreme Left of revolutionary labor. Both of them were men of outstanding character. Jaurès was much more than a hot-headed demagogue, of the new Bolshevik type, eager to destroy civilization in revenge against “Capital.” He was a lover of France in every fiber of his body and brain, and a man of many Christian qualities, including kindness and charity and personal morality, in spite of religious scepticism. He saw with clear vision the approaching danger of war with Germany, and he devoted his life, and lost it, on behalf of antimilitarism, believing that German democracy could be won over to international peace, if French democracy would link up with them. It was for that reason that he attacked the three years’ system of military service, and denounced the increasing expenditure of France on military preparations. But to attain his ideal of international peace, he played into the hands of revolutionary labor, and defended many of its violent methods, including “direct action.” It was with Aristide Briand that he had drawn up the plans of a general strike in which every trade union or syndicate in France would join at the appointed hour, in order to demonstrate the power of “Labor” and to overthrow the autocracy of “Capital.”
When Briand deserted the Left Wing, modified his views for the sake of office, and finally became Premier of France, Jaurès, who had taunted him as a renegade, put into operation against him the weapon he had helped to forge. A general strike was declared.
There were astonishing scenes in Paris. The machinery of social life came to a dead stop. No railway trains arrived or departed, and I had a sensational journey from Calais to Paris in the last train through, driven by an amateur who had not mastered the mystery of the brakes, so that the few passengers, with the last supply of milk for Paris, were bumped and jolted with terrifying shocks.
Food from the rural districts was held up on wayside stations, and Paris was like a besieged city, living on rapidly diminishing stocks. The “Metro” ceased work, and armies of clerks, shopgirls, and business men had to walk to their work from suburbs or distant quarters. They made a joke of it, and laughed and sang on their way, as though it was the greatest jest in the world. But it became beyond a jest after the first day or two, especially at night, when Paris was plunged into abysmal darkness because the electricians had joined the railway men and all other branches of labor.
The restaurants and cafés along the great boulevards were dimly lighted by candles stuck into wine and beer bottles, and bands of students from the Latin Quarter paraded with paper lanterns, singing the Funeral March and other doleful ditties, not without a sense of romance and adventure in that city of darkness. The apaches, who love not the light, came out of their lairs, beyond Clichy, and fell upon wanderers in the gloom, robbing them of their watches and ready money, and clubbing them if they put up any resistance. No milk could be had for love or money, no butter, eggs, fish, or fresh meat, except by the rich hotels which cornered the markets with their small supplies brought in by farm carts, hand carts, or babies’ perambulators.